


Between the Heart and the Blade

by yunyu



Series: Alpha/Beta/Omega AU [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Alternate Universe, Awkwardness, Bonding, Canon-Typical Violence, Childhood Friends, F/M, Marking, Mating Bites, Mating Bond, Omega Verse, Ramen, Romance, Shyness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-08-17 10:24:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8140588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunyu/pseuds/yunyu
Summary: This will be a collection of side-pieces to my main work "Heart Under a Blade." They all take place in the same Omegaverse, so please see the main work for the world-building part. I'm starting out with smut so we're going straight for E rating to begin with, but there will almost certainly be pieces that would be rated T or below.Tags will be updated according to the stories within.1. "You Know What I Like." AsuKure, rated E. "Her apartment has that faint smell of smoke pretty often, and people say where there’s smoke there’s fire. People think there’s fire between us, I know. They wonder who we’re trying to kid. Asuma and Kurenai, the big joke. It’s been years. Why are we pretending to be a secret?"2. "Ramen Rater". NaruHina, rated G. Hinata follows Sakura's suggested of using ramen as an icebreaker with naruto. Set between ch. 9 and 10.





	1. Chapter 1

Kurenai has always had a weird knack of anticipating me. Maybe it’s something to do with being an genjutsu type—she tried to tell me something one day, something about reality and illusion and coincidence and luck, but it was one of those things that goes through my brain like water. Like smoke.

When I have a sudden inclination to go and visit her, the window’s always open. When I don’t intend to do so, it’s always closed. Does she sense me? Is there something in my chakra that tells her I’m thinking about her?

If that’s the case, though, she would be leaving her window open a lot more.

When I climb in the window, she always pulls out an ashtray with a smile. I’ll say, “Sure it’s ok if I smoke in here?” and she’ll say, “If my apartment doesn’t smell like smoke it’s like you weren’t even here.”

Her apartment has that faint smell of smoke pretty often, and people say where there’s smoke there’s fire. People think there’s fire between us, I know. They wonder who we’re trying to kid. Asuma and Kurenai, the big joke. It’s been years. Why are we pretending to be a secret?

But there isn’t any fire. That’s the big joke.

I could say that I’ve never kissed Kurenai. I’ve never caressed her face, never run my fingers tenderly through that wild hair of hers, never pulled on it while taking her from behind. I’ve never seen how she looks with her lips around my cock, never tasted her blood oozing from a love bite, never heard what she sounds like when she cums.

That is true, but it’s also true in a way that I’ve never done any of that with anyone _but_ Kurenai. I do it in the dark, or with my eyes closed. I’ve never known the real thing, so the imitation, whichever female body—for an hour it’s hers.

Reality and illusions.

It’s freezing today, but when I climb up her apartment building’s wall her window is open. After I let myself in and accept that she accepts my constant smoking, she asks me what I want to drink.

“You know what I like,” I say.

Her hand grazes over the necks of the bottles in her liquor cabinet, as if touching them reveals something. A bottle of rye whiskey apparently feels right, as that’s what she pours on the rocks for me. I take a sip and watch her perform a complicated operation involving swirls of absinthe, two glasses, a sugar cube, and a lot of cognac. When she’s finished, she curls up in an armchair opposite mine like a contented cat.

No, not a cat. That’s too domestic for her. A jaguar or a panther maybe? But they wouldn’t be in an armchair, would they. Something very reserved and feminine and wild and fierce and—

“Stop staring at me like that,” she chides with a smile.

This is the curse of being around kunoichi. To a civilian girl, I was looking into my drink.

“Caught me,” I say, playing it off lightly. I’m good at that. I tap my cigarette on the ashtray to knock off some ash and then lean back for a drag. I look out the window, now closed. “It’s been a while. How’d you know I was back?”

“I saw Chouji-kun at the gyoza cart across the street not long ago. Thought you might come by.”

I shake my head. “After I treated them to Yakiniku Q for lunch? Can’t believe that fatty sometimes.”

“Asuma, you know Akimichis need to be fat for their fighting style. Why do you tease him like that? His lack of confidence is his problem, not his waistline.”

“See, you’re what they call a ‘good teacher,’” I say, making air quotes with my cigarette hand.

“You’re a better teacher than you think. They really listen to you.”

I shrug, but I can’t help enjoying Kurenai’s compliments. Not to mention the little lick she does to her ruby lips after taking a drink from her glass.

“Aoba’s team came back today too, by the way,” she says. “They saw me buying that whiskey actually. Shinobu had the nerve to ask me if it was for you. I told him of course not.”

“But it _was_ for me. You don’t drink this stuff.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course, but if I admitted that, that would make them think we’re, you know, together.”

“Would that be such a bad thing for them to think?” The words were out of my mouth before I even registered that I was thinking them. I quickly take a drink from my glass to mask the shock on my own face.

Her eyes widen, and the silence sits awkwardly between us.

I try a light laugh. “Sorry. I know you just get mad that they’re trying to get in your business. I guess I’m a little arrogant. Hate to think a pretty girl like you would find the idea of me so offensive. Haha.” Light laugh, part two.

“But I thought…” she says slowly, then pauses. “No. You have, you always _tell_ me it upsets you when people think we’re together. You told me that just two weeks ago that you couldn’t pick up girls in Konoha because of it!”

Yes, I’d given her that excuse for not circulating at the bar (rather than sticking as if glued to the stool next to her). “I couldn’t be bothered to do something pointless,” I’d said. But that was really because when I could be in her orbit I didn’t want to leave it. I was trying to think of some way to respond when she began speaking again, lowering her gaze, which was uncharacteristic of her.

“And… after _that incident_ … when I said it would have been alright, you said… that it wouldn’t, that it would have been the worst thing…”

The familiar churning knot of guilt is swirling around with the whiskey in my stomach. “Kurenai, it wouldn’t have been bad because of you—”

“Oh, I know!” she says, a bit too lightly, a bit too quickly, lifting up her face again with a smile. “Just that—that we don’t suit each other, right? I understand that.”

She finishes her drink, gets up from her chair, and goes to move past me towards the sink with the empty glass, but I catch her wrist. “Kurenai.” I look up into her blood-red eyes, as gentle in their expression as they were violent in their colour. “It’s me that doesn’t suit—that isn’t good for you, alright?”

I let go of her wrist, but it stays frozen in position. “You’re saying that you want me.” I’m just as frozen, under her gaze. “You want me… have you wanted me all this time? But then, why… are you saying you have a _disease_ or something Asuma—”

I wouldn’t have thought anything in this situation could make me laugh, but that does, if only for a moment. “No, I don’t have a disease. Shit. You thought I was going out, picking up girls everywhere but Konoha in some attempt to spread an STD everywhere? Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“But then why—oh.” She crosses her arms. “You think you wouldn’t be able to stop playing around? Is that it?”

Oh, that lie is so tempting a solution, but somehow I can’t bring myself to say it.

“Because if we were… if we were bonded, you… you would never look at anyone but me…”

She sounds so sad, so vulnerable. As if she has longed for me to want her that way, and still can’t believe that I would.

“…I understand if you don’t want to give that up—”

“No, Kurenai.” I can’t let her believe for even one second that she isn’t worth giving up every other woman in the world. “You don’t understand. I want you, I want _only you_ , it’s _how_ I want you that isn’t good for you. _I don’t want to be good to you_.”

“What are you talking about? Kinky sex? You can only get off if I’m tied up or something? You think I couldn’t take anything that’s not vanilla?”

She says it so bluntly that I can only stare at her for the moment, long enough for her to say disgustedly, “Asuma, I could deck you! I may not go around recounting every moment of my sexual past but my longest relationship was _Genma—”_

“I’m not—that isn’t—“

“—and if it’s some kind of dirty talk or something I don’t mind that as long as you don’t get ideas about me calling you ‘master’ in public or—”

“Kurenai!” I say loudly, and because I never yell at her, ever, she stops.

“Kurenai,” I repeat more softly, staring at those lips again, “when I told you that it would have been the worst thing, that was because I knew the truth. The truth I never told you or my father or _anyone_.” I take a breath. I have never feared any enemy as much as I fear the consequences of revealing what really happened that day.

_“What did you do to her?!”_

My prisoner scowled at me. “It’s just a sedating and paralyzing drug, relax. That’s all I’m going to say, and that only because I can tell that you’ll kill me if she dies. She won’t die, ok? You’ll get her back to Konoha faster if you untie me enough to run—”

He choked and his throat gushed with blood.

I’d get there fastest without any prisoner at all.

I checked the hurried bandaging job I’d done to her wounds, slung Kurenai’s unconscious body across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry, and took off.

Her blood-matted hair.

Her torn dress.

And before I was halfway to Konoha, the scent of her—some underlying alluring fragrance that at some level I’d always sensed—bloomed.

An induced heat.

I nearly fell from a tree, but managed to grab a branch and swing myself down to the ground without too much difficulty.

I propped her up against a massive tree trunk, reached into a pocket, and pulled out the scent blockers.

And didn’t use them.

No one would know… I could say they were destroyed in the fight and no one would doubt me…

Genma would have to give her up then.

She would be mine… for the rest of our lives… she would love me, want me, only me. Bear my children. Gaze in my eyes. Take my cock.

And all the time the maddening fragrance of her heat was urging me on.

Some part of my brain was screaming at me that if I would just take the scent blocker I’d remember why this wasn’t right.

I threw the capsules away as hard as I could before that part of my brain could convince me.

 _I’ll rip her dress… rip my own pants… they’ll say I was out of control…_ Those were the evil thoughts going through my brain.

I knew she had a heat suppressant in her backpack, so that had to go next.

She smelled so amazing and she was so beautiful and the skin of her thighs was so soft as I pulled up her dress roughly… revealing a hidden pouch, tucked high on her inner thigh against her panty line.

Curiosity is a force that rivals lust.

In the present time, I make my confession.

“When I found that heat suppressant in your thigh pouch, Kurenai, it was only after I had _deliberately_ thrown away my scent blockers and your bag. I wanted to force bond you and get away with it. If I hadn’t opened that pouch, I would have _raped_ you. That’s who I am when my inhibitions are lowered. Someone who doesn’t give a shit about you except as an object.”

I get up to go, because surely she won’t want her near-rapist in her home another second, but she applies chakra to her hand and forces me back down. “Don’t I get a turn talking?”

The ash on my cigarette is getting long, but I’m sure my fingers will tremble if I try to tap it off into the ashtray. My voice will probably tremble too, so I stay silent.

“Putting aside the fact that heat pheromones don’t have anything to do with inhibitions,” she says slowly, “if you deliberately threw away two things that could have helped you, why didn’t you throw away the third in the same way, if you’re such a rapist asshole as you say?”

I try to remember.

I remember pulling out the syringe and suddenly feeling such intense shame and sorrow.

_Kurenai doesn’t want this._

_She keeps a secret pouch here as a failsafe because she doesn’t want this._

_You shithead, she DOESN’T WANT THIS!_

And with a scowl I had stabbed it in her thigh and depressed it.

“I don’t know,” I tell Kurenai. “I acted on an impulse.” I can’t think of how to express the truth without it sounding like I’m trying to excuse myself.

Kurenai’s skin is as soft as I remember as her fingers touch my face, then actually take the cigarette from my lips. I’m left, mouth hanging stupidly open, to watch her casually stub it out in the ashtray.

“What are you doing?”

“An impulse,” she murmurs, lowering herself onto the sofa next to me and untying my forehead protector, running her fingers through my hair. It feels so good, like a dream. I close my eyes.

“Asuma, I love you,” she says in the same low, hypnotic voice. “Even if the worst you think of yourself was true, even if you had force bonded me, I would still love you. Because all you’re really saying is that you behaved like almost any alpha would who had a conscious attraction to the omega in heat. But that isn’t what happened. You stopped yourself. The only thing an alpha has to fight the instincts is their consciousness. So if you really used that heat suppressant on impulse, then that impulse must truly be who you are deep inside.”

I feel the subtle shift in the cushions, and her lips brush against mine, startling my eyes open.

“So what was that impulse?” she breathes. “I want the truth.”

Her eyes are more mesmerizing than her voice. “Is this genjutsu…?”

“No genjutsu between us, I promise… unless you’re into that,” she says with a dark little laugh that has my cock hardening without regard to the roiling, complicated emotions that my other head is trying to sift through. “The truth,” she repeats.

“It was that you didn’t want it.”

“And you didn’t want to hurt me?”

“I…”

Her mouth is on mine again, and this time she’s placing a hand on my crotch exactly where my erection bulges most.

“Kurenai,” I groan.

“I’m glad you didn’t force bond me, but only because I want to be aware and enjoying every.” She undoes my button. “Single.” The zipper lowers. “Moment of it.”

Her hand slips inside my underwear and caresses me, but I grab her wrist.

“This has to be perfectly clear, Kurenai. You want to bond with me? On our first time?”

“What, do you need a trial fuck?” she says impishly, and leans forward and kisses me.

I have to release her wrist in order to take her into my arms like I want to, and she immediately returns to stroking me, and when her mouth opens into the kiss and my tongue slips inside her mouth she caresses it with her own tongue in sync with the movement of her hand.

I lose focus on the idea that I’ve got to make sure this is what she wants then.

“Bedroom,” I practically growl, and she hums an approval into my neck and backs away, bringing me up with her and through the door into her room with its quaint foreign-style four poster bed. My vest and her forehead protector hit the floor along the way.

It’s going to take too long to undress her, with her complicated dress and her bandaged arms and thighs. Even longer because my much simpler clothes come off immediately and the feel of her fingers on my skin does strange things to my own fingers.

“Clumsy,” she teases. “Let me, you’ll rip it.”

She pulls away, back to the head of the bed, and I relish the chance to simply look at her stripping, the slow reveal of what I’ve only seen in my fantasies, the sensuous way she has of twisting to get it all off.

And fuck are her breasts amazing.

“You’re beautiful.” It’s probably a clumsy way to express what I’m feeling, too, but I don’t think I can do much better right now.

She flexes a newly bare arm and suddenly looks almost shy. “Well, you’re very handsome.”

“Handsome? Me?”

“Mm.” She looks down at the thigh she’s unwrapping. “Rugged. Masculine.”

I crawl forward, trapping her against the headboard. “Sexy?”

She actually reddens a little, and tells her thighs, “Seen a mirror lately?”

“You have one against the wall, right?” I murmur into her shoulder before kissing it. The muscles move beneath the skin as she lifts her head up, and I imagine what she’s seeing in the mirror. Me, from the back, sliding my hand up her leg.

“You have a cute butt,” she giggles.

“Oh really,” I say, then kiss my way up to her ear, where I lick her earlobe and whisper, “I know what’s cute.”

My hand slips between her legs and she’s so wet and ready for me that I push two fingers into her without any other warning, then immediately begin massaging her clit with my thumb as she jerks with a high little keening sound.

“I knew you’d sound cute.” Fuck, the way she’s blushing now… “I want to hear you, Kurenai. Make those little sounds for me. Tell me how it feels.”

“Ahh… Asuma… uhn, it’s… it’s too—ah!” One of her hands is clutching at my shoulder, the other has snaked around my waist to stroke that butt she found so cute.

“Too what?” I pull my fingers almost out and rub back and forth in tiny motions at the entrance, letting my thumb slip off her pearl entirely. “Too much? Or should I stop?”

She smacks my butt lightly. “Don’t you _dare_ stop Asuma.”

I resume fucking her with my fingers, savouring each motion of her hips, each strangled sound. “Seems like too much is what you want, huh? I’ll give it to you.”

As I experiment with angle and depth, she suddenly lets out a full throated cry. I curl my fingertips against that place again and I’m rewarded with another cry and a grip on my shoulder so hard it’s actually painful. “Is this it, Kurenai?” I grunt, and start giving it to her good, tormenting that secret place until her whole body is shuddering. When I take her breast into my mouth to suck on that soft luscious skin her moans become words again.

“Oh! Asuma! It’s too—ah! Too good! Asuma!”

I suck my fingers clean as she pants, then kiss her lips, letting her taste the evidence of what I’ve just done to her. “I love you, Kurenai.”

She seems to hesitate. “I’m _in love_ with you, Asuma,” she says softly, using the stronger Japanese term.

“I’m in love with you too. And… I want to bond with you, but I worry that it’s too fast…”

“I’ve been in love with you since I was seventeen,” she confesses. “Over ten years. How can things be moving too fast? Actually it’s just that we’re horribly slow.”

“Then I must be even slower, huh? I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve. Twelve when I first started thinking of it that way, anyway…”

“So let’s not waste any more time,” she says, and tugs on my hip to urge me inside her.

“Wait. Protection?”

“If I was fertile you’d know.” Oh fuck. The thought of knotting her nearly makes me shove my hips into her immediately. “As for diseases… you’ve been tested recently?”

“I haven’t had sex since I was tested last,” I can say truthfully, hoping that she won’t ask when or with who I last had sex with. I plan to forget all about them.

“Mm. I haven’t had sex since Souta died. So I don’t have any condoms around anyway.”

It may be selfish but I plan to forget all about Souta too.

I’ve never had sex without a condom before. Fuck, I hope I can last. How fucking embarrassing would that be.

“How do you want to do this?”

“Mm. How do you come fastest?” I say it teasingly but I seriously think I’ll need all the help I can get.

She slides down and rests her head on a pillow, her wild hair fanning about her as she grins. “Oh, I like it _deep._ ”

Oh, Kurenai. How I want to please this woman.

I’m between her legs again and hoisting her ankles onto my shoulders in a flash. Those gorgeous crimson eyes widen at me and then squeeze shut with her scream of pleasure as I thrust my cock into her to the hilt at one stroke. I pull most of the way out slowly and thrust hard again. She doesn’t scream this time, but the teeth biting her lip and way her fingers grasp and twist the sheets show how much she’s enjoying it.

“Deep and slow?” I ask, sliding out and back in. Her walls are so slick and hot, surrounding me. I’m inside Kurenai. I’m inside _Kurenai._

“Faster,” she moans. “Faster, please!”

“Well, since you asked so nicely,” I say, and lean forward as I increase my pace, gaining myself another delicious little scream as the penetration gets so deep that she can’t even take all of me. I kiss her and she kisses me back desperately.

There are little tears at the corner of her eyes, startling me into stilling. She lets out a little disappointed whine but I say, “Kurenai, are you alright? Am I hurting you?”

“I’m alright, please don’t stop, I like it. This is what I like, please, I want to feel it.” The tears flow a little, but she’s smiling. “I’m just happy… I can’t believe I can finally feel you… I want to _feel it!”_

And I know what she means.

Because it’s Kurenai.

I’m with Kurenai, I’m fucking Kurenai, Kurenai is in love with me, I’m inside _Kurenai!_

“Feel it then,” and my own speech gets ragged as I slam my body into hers over and over, as I hear her adorable little cries and rake my gaze over her trembling body. “Feel it, Kurenai. Cum around my cock and let me feel it too. _Feel it!”_

“I am, I feel it, Asuma, it’s going to… let me…”

She starts to flutter around me and I’m not sure what made me pick it but I place my hand over her mouth and she sinks her teeth into the heel of my palm without hesitation as she cums.

I can feel it then. Kurenai is inside me, we’re becoming one in a way that I’ve never done with anyone else, will never do with anyone else, and the ecstasy of being _connected,_ above and beyond what her tight walls are doing to my cock, pushes me over the edge as well.

Instinctually I turn my head and bite the back of her calf, the closest bit of her skin to me.

I can feel _myself_ flowing out of me into her wound just as surely as my semen is spurting into her. It’s like cumming twice, like cumming a thousand times. I want to scream but I can’t because I’m tasting her and kissing her and loving her and fucking her and good it’s so fucking good and we’re _connected_.

I’m a shuddery brainless mess when I collapse on top of her, hugging her to myself as urgently as her arms cling to me, the novel sensation of feeling like there’s part of me inside of her and part of her inside of me and both these parts and both these people are here dizzying me, intoxicating me.

“I hope you don’t have somewhere to be, because I don’t think I can move,” I moan.

She giggles tiredly, and I can feel her fatigue around the edges of my psyche, increasing my own exhaustion, and I can feel her joy too. It’s like there’s no hard boundary to where we stop and begin anymore. “We can stay here all day and all night if you like.”

“I like,” I grunt, and close my eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Self-challenge: Write smut in first person male POV, complete!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Set between chapter 9 and 10. Hinata takes Sakura's advice about using ramen as an icebreaker to talk to Naruto.

“N-naruto-kun… I was talking with Sakura-chan… and…”

“Eh? Did Sakura-chan say something about me?!”

He looks so eager, so happy. She fights off a lip wibble and says only, “Ah, sort of… I’m going on a m-mission where I need to bring camping food, so I thought I’d bring some cup ramen to use with boiled water from a kettle, but I don’t know which kind is good, so… Sakura-chan said you were the p-person to ask.”

“Oh! Yeah! I know everything there is to know about ramen! It’s kind of a hobby dattebayo…” He gets one of his adorable thinking faces on, finger tapping against screwed-up lips. “When do you want to go to the market? You wanna go now? Let’s go now!”

Hinata is swept along all the way inside the market and to the instant noodle aisle. He makes one of his characteristically overdramatic sweeping gestures as he says, “Ok! Now you have the two main kinds of ramen, the cup ramen over here, and bagged ramen over there. So, the advantage of the cup ramen is, all you need to do is heat up some water and pour it in, and when you’re finished eating, you throw away the cup. If you use disposable chopsticks, you don’t have to wash anything dattebayo!”

“Oh I see,” says Hinata politely. “That’s very c-convenient!”

“With the bagged ramen you actually have the wash the pot and the bowl,” he says, scrunching his face. “But it’s cheaper than the cup ramen for the quantity you get, so if you’re running out of money at the end of the month…” He trails off and reddens. “I guess you never have to worry about that, right? Hahaha.” It’s an awkward laugh.

Hinata’s impossibly blank eyes widen. “Naruto-kun, you don’t run out of food, do you?”

“Oh, not anymore, haha! Ha.” He coughs. “So, uh, cup ramen is better for missions like you were talking about. So, you just tell me what you like! Spicy? Chicken flavour? Beef flavour? Seafood flavour?”

He rattles off about a dozen more potential categories of instant ramen, then stares at her expectantly.

“I… never knew there were so many different kinds of ramen,” she says, looking over the shelves. “What about… this one?”

“Ooh, that’s an excellent choice dattebayo! Here, let me help you get enough for your mission.” He produces a pair of clones to start loading up their arms with ramen. “How long do you think you’re going to be gone?”

“Maybe three days?”

Naruto, who has seen Hinata in action at Ichiraku, produces another clone. “Gonna need more…”

Hinata really isn’t interested in eating nothing but ramen but for every meal of her mission, but Naruto is over at the till checking out before she can think of a way to put this. She hands over the money while she thinks.

“U-um, Naruto-kun… I think we will have some other meals during the mission so this is too much, but… maybe you could take half of these? As a gift, for your help.”

Naruto is so surprised that one of his clones pops out of existence and the other clones scramble to grab the falling ramen packages. “A gift? For me?”

“Yes, a thank you g-gift.”

“Wow, Hinata… that is… the best gift ever?! Thank you! Free ramen, wow! You’re the best Hinata! I totally love you! I’ll go drop these off at your place and mine then, see you later!”

Hinata presses her hands to her hot face and sinks to her knees as Naruto and his clones burst off in all directions. _Do not faint… do not faint… do not faint…_


End file.
